For the Curious ...

Are you a proud owner of the Samsung Galaxy S3 ? Do you have a persistent missed call notification which does not clear itself and there is a permanent red “1” icon on the Phone, Look no further, let’s look at the solution real quick. I must confess, this has haunted me for months before I could find the solution. I went from ICS to JB and had the same problem. Off course my phone is on the Stock ROM. The following steps needs to be taken to clear this out. 1. Reboot the Phone – Duh!, I guess you guys would have done this. 2. If you have voice mail services On, please ensure you have listened to all your Voicemails, and if possible deleted them and then rebooted your phone If the above 2 steps have not cleared it out, here is what you got to do. Go to your Settings app and click on Application manager, Scroll to the right , to select “ALL” and then select “Badge Provider”. Click on  Clear data If needed, click on Clear Cache also (In the badge provider) and then reb...

Networking Needs The Next Gen networking needs can be broadly listed down as the following · More network layer 2 partitions · Programmatically and dynamically shape the traffic · Dynamically control the flow of traffic · Automated provision of the networking resources · QoS extensibility · Security of the network We also need to keep into mind that the IPv4 pool has officially exhausted, so these needs are applicable to both IPv4 (existing networks) and IPv6. In order to full fill these needs there is not a single technology but a group of them which can work alongside each other. But the needs clearly mention that there needs to be software involved in the networking. Hence the umbrella term SDN – Software Defined Networking is coined. Software Defined Networking Traditionally the routers/switches have had proprietary software inside them which took the decisions to forward packets and where to forward them. These software’s were proprietary and were controlled by compani...

  So, we all know Cloud is the new buzz word in the IT industry and most of the companies are looking at using the Cloud in some form or the other. This has led the CIO’s to ask one question “What issues do we foresee in moving to the Cloud?” Even before we hear this question come out, we have a slew of topics that are presented on the same topic. This includes, Cloud Security, Cloud Integration, Cloud Management, so on and so forth. Once issue that often gets missed, or given low priority is “Networks”, which are the basic life line of any Organization. Since network is so transparent that people talking about compute environments tend to overlook it. If you are reading this, and going how is network impacted. Is it always impacted? In order to be able to answer these questions, we need to consider the following · What is my current model · What part of my Infrastructure will be cloud enabled? · What Cloud model am I considering? Depending on these questions, we may have t...

Configuring multicast routing using Protocol Independent Multicast in a all Juniper environment is as simple as the Cisco environment, but when I searched, I dint find good articles or KB’s explaining this, so I decided to write one. I am fairly certain that if you have searched and arrived at this post, you know the basics of multicasting and IGMP, but yet, for the benefit of all readers, I will in brief describe the need for multicast. Please note, that this is just the IPv4 version of the story presented in a understandable manner and not all aspects of multicast are covered, but only the ones needed for this post. What is Multicast ? In IPv4 we have 3 kinds of packets, Unicast – One Source, One Destination Broadcast – One source and all destinations Multicast – One source and many destinations Now, all of us are familiar with the first one, we use it almost every minute we are on a network connected equipment. To, explain all this, lets choose different ...

After I wrote the blog for using HAProxy ( http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ ) for Exchange 2010 in order to reduce a few thousand dollars from your budget of purchasing a load balancer. Now though that blog would have helped people in doing a Proof of Concept, there is some thing that is missing from it. REDUNDANCY!!! Yes, the whole idea of load balancing is to remove the single point of failure, but what if the Load balancer is the new single point of failure ? yes, that’s why we need two of them For the people who are reading this first, please read the http://3-4-5-6.blogspot.com/2011/03/ha-proxy-for-exchange-2010-deployment.html Now, once you have read through it, you should know that this is a working load balancer example and Steve has also created a VMWare solution for it. Now, this is brilliant if the load balancer stays up, but we have to plan for the worse. Though, I haven’t seen the HAProxy crash “Knock on wood”, we still need a redundant solution. This blog will explain...

Lately, I have been working on designing Cloud based Datacenters and suggesting Cloud Solutions for customers, etc. I have evaluated quite a few vendors at different spaces in the cloud (Infra, Platform, Security, etc.). I thought, I would share one of the most asked questions by customers. Q: How do I SaaSify (or SaaS enable) my application ? Before I jump on to answering that question, I would like to draw some background here, I believe in my prior blogs, I did mention about what is Cloud and all the other stuff (which you may not care about) . In this section, we will look at SaaS So, lets start from the basics, the “ Necessity”… Quite frankly, the primary need for cloud is to ‘ Get more Bang out of the buck’ and that all … Isn’t it always about it? Almost, the cloud however also provides other features like availability, resiliency, yada yada … Lets answer the following question … Q: What is SaaS?   Let’s take a look at software! How can I get more from the in...

In my previous blog, where I mentioned how to use HA Proxy( http://haproxy.1wt.eu/ – Open source Load balancing Solution) based load balancer for Exchange 2010 ( Link to Post ), I had a few requests on how to do the SSL offloading as well. If you have followed that guide, you have your SSL certificates hosted on the Exchange Hub CAS servers. Microsoft does suggest to use the SSL on the boxes, but you can offload it as well, please remember that I am writing this for a generic https server and we will be using 2 open source products. We will use HA Proxy for the Load balancing and the Pound for the SSL offloading. Now, for this purposes, I have used a single box, but for production machines, you may want to make a HA Pair of Linux box, which I will cover in a different post. I have been running HA Proxy in the exchange environment and it is great, the only thing, I could ask for is source port based persistence . Anycase, back to the topic. Here is how the architecture will look lik...